Day 21: The Ugly, The Clean Cleanse is Over & Regular "BM"

Earlier this week, I talked briefly about The Good (Food) & The Bad of cleansing. For my final post, I am going to discuss something that's a bit on the Ugly side...

I didn't talk about this at all during the first time I cleansed, but I thought it would be good for me to discuss it this time around.

For those of you who still have no clue what I'm talking about, I'm refering to the downright dirty part of the cleanse, "BM" or dare I say it on a food blog... bowel movements.

I won't put you through the torture of reading this if you're not interested, but it's important to learn more if you're seriously considering the cleanse.

Two weeks ago, I mentioned on Day 9 that after a first week of doing Clean the second time around, I felt like I was plateauing on the cleanse. At that time, I had been following the elimination diet and stuck to eating 2 liquid meals and 1 solid lunch a day along with a few supplements.

However, the official Clean Program along with the Clean Kit also includes a deep internal body cleanse aided by supplements.

In an effort to dig a little deeper into the cleanse, I decided to pick up more supplements to build a stronger cleanse. Up until this point, I felt like I was following the book pretty well, so I was interested to see what the Whole Food's 365 Complete Body Cleanse supplements would add to my cleanse.

A more detailed review of this two week cleanse kit is in my product review.

For those of you who don't know, this cleanse journal documents my second time doing the Clean cleanse. In Clean, Dr. Junger often stresses the importance of bowel movements. One of the most key components of a well functioning digestive system is the ability to "go".

Let's talk about poo!

Up until this point in my life, I honestly never thought too much about poo. According to Dr. Junger, he says that during the cleanse, your bowel movements should happen once a day, and the consistency is supposed to be similar to peanut butter. Graphic, I know. Don't say I didn't warn you.

However, the first time that I did the cleanse, I wasn't too regular, despite drinking my daily shakes with extra flaxseed (aka fiber) in it, as well as eating all those vegetables. I had to take other supplements to help encourage my daily poo, Dr. Junger actually encourages that you take either castor oil or other senna products to help you go. I preferred drinking senna teas which really helped ensure that I was going every morning. My tea of choice was the 3 Ballerina Tea
that you can often find in an Asian supermarket.

Still, even when I had to go, the consistency was never like peanut butter - until I started using the 365 Complete Body Cleanse. During the first 3-4 days of using the extra supplements, I didn't notice much of the a difference. The only thing that I thought the pills was helping me with was drinking a few extra cups of water during the morning and night. The fiber pills, as a result, really filled me up and helped me not feel hungry at all.

However, a few more days in after that, I started to notice that I could skip my daily dose of senna, because I was able to go just fine, and disgustingly enough, I started to realize what having BMs that have the consistency of peanut butter was like.

I feel that this alone was an obvious benefit of taking the supplementary cleanse on The Clean Program, and quite possibly one of the least expensive way to integrate a few of the key components of the Clean Kit ($12.99 for Complete Body Cleanse, $300+ for The Clean Kit). Of course, I'm not saying that this kit that I was using can completely substitute for all the other things that come in the kit. For cleanse supplements, you can refer to my post here.

If you've read this far, I thank you for following my cleanse journey. Being able to share some of my cleanse experiences with you has made the experience a bit more fun and has pushed me to think about my cleanse on a deeper level. I'll wrap things up soon with a post-cleanse blog post to recap some of the things I've learned from doing the Clean Program a second time around and probably notes on how I would go about doing it again in the future.